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He Can Sing It, if Not Speak It

Bill Callahan sinks into his baritone on his latest album, “Apocalypse.” He mostly avoids face-to-face interviews.Credit
Erich Schlegel for The New York Times

BILL CALLAHAN’S “Apocalypse” is a record that knows itself. Mr. Callahan, 44, one of our best lyricists and now — finally — a singer approaching excellence, uses his voice carefully, in a no-vibrato baritone, going down to Merle Haggard’s range. His recent songs have the pace of a more confiding time in music, when singer-songwriters in Nashville and Los Angeles were first working out what male sensitivity sounds like. “Apocalypse” can resemble an early-1970s record by Gordon Lightfoot or Mickey Newbury, but more heavy-hearted, slowed down by a quarter, with far fewer chords, and with words that embody rather than explain.

Its lyrics form a bestiary: cattle, hog, bee and buffalo are all here, as well as the phrase “work’s calving increments and love’s coltish punch.” It works the phrase “my apocalypse” into the fourth and seventh songs, which are the first and last tracks of the album’s second side in its vinyl version. Its last lyric, sung twice and meaningfully, is “DC 450”: the catalog number of the album, released last week on the label Drag City.

The record’s fulcrum, lyrically and conceptually, comes around the middle, halfway through the fourth track. In the song, “Universal Applicant,” over a slithering, one-chord piece of music, the narrator fires a flare gun, an action that Mr. Callahan first describes and then imitates, in two small and precise aspirant sounds. I noticed it — went back to hear it a few times more in fact — but didn’t know how important it was to the whole work.

“That part of the song is the turning point of the record,” he told me recently. In e-mail, he is sharp and funny and occasionally strident, but in person he’s nearly the opposite: hesitating to name or quantify very much, rounding off incomplete thoughts with quick, conciliatory grins. At my request we went to a place where we could talk freely in almost complete quiet, a Midtown office-building cafeteria at night. Still, he radiated reluctance, and my recorder had trouble registering his voice.

“The record,” he continued, “is kind of, like, blind, or searching, until that point, and then the flare goes off and the music stops for a second. And from that point on, it’s like, the music is illuminated.” It makes sense once you hear him put it this way: The themes on the second half of the record are about acceptance, freedom and “riding for the feeling.” But he doesn’t expect anyone else to pick up on it. “There is a story line there that is speaking to some part of your body,” he said uneasily. “It’s pretty abstract.”

This is what Mr. Callahan does: put a big and mysterious idea in a modest place. He has gotten better and better at it. “The thing that’s uniquely his,” said the singer-songwriter John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats in a recent e-mail, “is to sort of smuggle in scenes of remarkable emotional and, I gotta say, spiritual weight within these fairly light constructions.”

The first time I saw Mr. Callahan perform, in the mid-90s, he was working under the name Smog, and he had recently come to terms with his deep voice. He sang indirect character sketches about bad or isolated people in a series of blank monotones, accompanying himself crudely with acoustic guitar; he stood tall and thin and upright under neat, boyish brown hair, a catatonic expression and yellow sunglasses.

He seemed very, very strange. An audience was there to see him. He was already, in underground terms, a hero and a major object of interest for the kind of woman who loves Leonard Cohen records. But he made no visible effort to connect with it. Of course he was connecting like crazy.

He was past 30 then, and into his middle period. By that point, as Smog, he’d already made 10 albums in nine years — if you include 4 squalid-sounding homemade cassettes available by mail order through his mid-80s fanzine, Disaster, in which his writing style was as talky and alive as his later performance style was Dr. Bleak.

The early period began at home in Silver Spring, Md. (Mr. Callahan’s father spent his career with the National Security Agency as a language analyst; his mother worked there too. “Doing what?” I asked. “Same sort of thing,” he said. Eight seconds elapsed. “You know, like code....” he trailed off. “Breaking.”) He wrote songs as a teenager, quit for a while, and restarted at 22, with an eight-track recorder and a guitar he didn’t know how to play very well.

His early songs were squawked in a high voice; he wrote from the id about alienation and contempt. “I feel like an astronaut/suffocating on the moon,” went a lyric to a pained song, “Astronaut,” one of dozens. (He would gradually move toward songs about sex and sadness and vengeance — he is an admirer of the novelists James M. Cain and Richard Yates — and finally to his present state of grace, in which love is not always tortured and the metaphors run prehistoric: water, horses, birds.)

Photo

Bill Callahan, 44, at home in Austin, Tex., explains the evolution of his craft and his new album.Credit
Erich Schlegel for The New York Times

Originally, he said, he envisioned that he would never perform, do interviews, or sell a record. Did that come from the fanzine and hardcore-punk ethos of never compromising? Or was that something innate?

“Um,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Mr. Callahan now lives in Austin, Tex., but hasn’t particularly associated himself with that city. The same goes for the other places he’s lived: New Hampshire, Illinois, New York, Georgia, South Carolina, and various locales in California. (During some of those periods he was involved in romantic relationships with imposing women: the singer-songwriters Chan Marshall, Joanna Newsom and Cindy Dall; and the writer and performance artist Lisa Carver.) He has mostly avoided face-to-face interviews, and in one encounter with a fanzine writer, from 1995, he described himself as “asocial.”

To me he spoke more on the theme of his early willed obscurity. “I guess it was probably just like a protection, a way of keeping it small.” Was it about not wanting to be narcissistic? “That was part of it,” he said, sounding pained. “It was just trying to keep it, like, pure.”

Between his early days and now Mr. Callahan has gradually turned himself inside out. At first the nasal, twerpy whine deepened and straightened itself out into something breathier and more emotional; then the emotion slowly drained away until he became austere.

And over the past few years, since “A River Ain’t Too Much to Love,” his last album as Smog, Mr. Callahan has started using space and rhythm better, arranging his sung lines between fingerpicked patterns on his acoustic guitar. He has learned to imply emotion lightly and indirectly, or in meta-ish ways — like the flare gun, for instance.

His writing has become refined, in the direction of formal exercises that remain somehow transparent, and his voice is beginning to sound complete. “I’m trying to be more... ,” he said, searching for the word. “Yeah, just more — universal, or something.”

It’s a pretty complete artistic transformation. Rian Murphy, the office manager at Drag City and a former drummer with Mr. Callahan’s touring bands, explained it to me this way: “Once Bill was making extremely forward statements from behind a veil. Now he’s making veiled statements from a forward position. He’s fundamentally the same person, but stylistically almost everything has changed.”

Mr. Callahan doesn’t provide an autobiographical key to any of these changes, except to talk about them as a result of sharpening his method, and slightly relaxing the limitations he has placed on himself. When making a record, he said, first he writes all the lyrics to the songs, without music, and puts them in the proper sequence. Then he writes melodies, with acoustic guitar, and thinks about who should play on the record and what it should sound like. Through the late ’90s he’d come to the studio, play the songs unaccompanied for the musicians, and then they’d tape the songs live, with no rehearsals.

More recently that’s changed; the band on “Apocalypse” had a few days’ rehearsal. Still, you can’t help notice that the band is feeling its way through: a few songs have ragged starts. Likewise, he said the story of his voice changing is the story of moving from home recording to working with good engineers. Before “River,” “the way I tended to learn things, I just threw myself into things,” he said. “I did a lot of work without thinking about it in a calm, rational way. Stopping and thinking about what I was doing made my music calmer and deeper in tone.”

Back in the ’90s I saw Mr. Callahan as part of a larger group of singer-songwriters who were creating a weird new affectlessness: Ms. Marshall, in her recordings as Cat Power; Will Oldham; Ms. Dall. Sometimes it seemed as if it wasn’t a musical endeavor as much as something else — literary, or philosophical, or attitudinal.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Callahan doesn’t see it that way at all. He hardly finished reading a book until he was about 20, he said. He only writes songs as songs. (“Poetry is, like, foreign to me,” he said.) He also claims to have no interest in songwriting as craft. (“I just want to go to that place that music takes you. I don’t even know how you can study a good song.”) And he does not see his work as related to anyone else’s.